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LYNDHURST — Crews have removed over 400 tons of debris left by Hurricane Sandy from the Meadowlands Commission campus at DeKorte Park, and there's a lot more left to clean up.

The scene is similar at all of the Commission's parks, visited by about 60,000 people annually, which remain closed in the storm's wake. Officials there aren't yet giving estimates on when they'll be opened to the public again.

"Not until it's safe," said Tom Marturano, the state agency's director of solid waste management and natural resources. "That's all I can tell you."

Much of the marshy grasses, or wrack, that Sandy swept over park grounds has been carted off, but piles of it line the trails where whole docks were lifted out of the water and left stranded on embankments. At River Barge Park, a 5.5 acre marina opened just this summer, the bolts of brand new docks were stripped clean by the strength of the swollen Hackensack River, pulling them off their concrete abutments.

The damage at DeKorte park alone is estimated at over $1 million. Throughout the park system, clean-up and repair costs could easily exceed $2 million. Insurance adjusters visited the parks last week, officials said, and the commission has received FEMA relief during previous storms, like Hurricane Irene.

"But what they'll cover, who knows?" Marturano said.

After the storm, the Meadowlands Commission had 400 tons of wrack, mostly the invasive phragmites reeds, to remove from their Lyndhurst campus at DeKorte Park. Courtesy Jim Wright/NJMC

When a six-hour sea surge overtopped the floodgates and berms along the Hacksensack at the height of the storm, floodwaters swelled the tidal marshes of the Meadowlands and sent several feet of water into surrounding towns.

In the days after the storm, the surge of ocean water doubled the salinity of the wetlands, which are usually a third as salty as the Atlantic ocean, Marturano said. The salinity levels have since returned to normal, as the tidewaters returned to the sea, leaving behind a mess for the commission, and the rest of New Jersey, to clean up.

And then there are all the fish — mostly carp — left behind by the surge.

But aside from the stranded fish, which are good news for scavengers like raccoons, the storm's impact on the non-human denizens of the Meadowlands is still being assessed.

"It's still a functioning estuary," Marturano said. "You could argue that it's better than before, because there's new wetlands where there weren't wetlands before."

A great blue heron rests at Mill Creek in Secaucus after Hurricane Sandy battered the park. S.P. Sullivan/NJ.com

The birds have returned, for certain. On Thursday, ducks and gulls showed their numbers and kingfisher and great blue heron had returned to the marshland. Red-tailed hawk surveyed the damage overhead.

Jim Wright, a communications officer for the Meadowlands Commission, observed the birds through his binoculars, calling them "a symbol of the recovery of the Hackensack River."

"The familiar birds are all back," he said. "They had the good sense to get the heck out of here before the storm came."

In the coming weeks, naturalists from the commission and other agencies will be going from site to site, taking count of the species that call the wetlands home and cataloging the storm's impact. Wright said it wasn't clear how the ground-dwelling animals fared during the storm.

"If you live in a burrow and get hit with an eight-foot swell, I don't know what you do," he said.

Some of the commission's sites, like Mill Creek in Secaucus, present a logistical challenge for repairs. The park's trails are too narrow for heavy equipment, but strong winds toppled sizable white birch trees, blocking pathways and presenting a hazard to hikers and joggers who frequent the site.

Professional contractors will have to do most of the heavy removal work, commission officials said. Once the large debris is removed, the agency will see whether it's safe to bring in volunteers to clear away the wrack, mostly the invasive phragmites that plague the region and muscle out native plants.

"If the volunteers can get in and pick up trash and debris, then gradually we'll get back to some semblance of normal again," Wright said.

Editor's note:An earlier version of this post stated that a berm break along the Hackensack river caused the flooding in the Meadowlands, based on comments Gov. Chris Christie made in the days after Hurricane Sandy. Meadowlands Commission officials pointed out that historic flooding overtopped the berms and floodgates, but did not break them, and a call to Andy Derickson of Kane Mitigation, LLC, which leases the property where the berm sits from the Commission, confirmed that the berm did not break during the storm, though it did suffer some erosion damage from floodwaters. This post has been updated based on interviews conducted Friday morning.